- I'm Dave Paunesku, and I'm
the executive director of PERTS which is the Project for
Education Research That Scales. It's a center at Stanford University. PERTS makes a variety of resources that help educators learn about
the science of motivation. And we do that in order to help educators inspire all of their
students to learn fearlessly. When students have a growth mindset, when they're thinking in a growth mindset, they're really thinking of their abilities as something that they can
grow, something like a muscle. Something that they can grow over time by investing their effort
into the right strategy. When students are thinking
in a fixed mindset, they tend to think of their
abilities as something fixed, something like eye color, something they really can't
change about themselves. When students are thinking
in a growth mindset, they're doing I think two things that are really helpful,
that'll ultimately help them be more successful, that'll
help them be more motivated. One is that they're viewing challenges really as opportunities
to grow their abilities. That means they're much less
likely to be discouraged if they encounter something
that's challenging. In contrast, they might be more likely to seek out challenges, and
research shows that, in fact, when students are thinking
in a growth mindset, they're more likely to seek out more challenging work. The second piece is that they realize that if they're really stuck on something, then the key to doing that, one, might be to persist, but
two, and just as important, is to switch up the
strategies they're using. Maybe to seek out help from someone. And if they're thinking
in a growth mindset they're gonna be less likely to be worried that if they need help that means that they're not smart enough to succeed. Instead they'll understand that their teachers and their peers are there to help them grow and develop as learners. So through the Learnstorm activities, we're really trying to arm teachers with a bunch of activities
that will help them and their students learn together about the science of learning and the science of growth mindset that will help them engage in important kinds of self reflection. And different kinds of activities that could help kinda
really reinforce those ideas over the course of Learnstorm. But then also kinda create
a model, a scaffold, and an approach toward self reflection and thinking about learning,
and about growth mindset. That could then be kinda
revisited throughout the year to really reinforce these ideas. And to remind students to
keep going and keep growing.